Speech: Canterbury Maori Community Consultation Hui

Last Thursday was to be a significant day for our whanau. It was the day we would establish ourselves in Otautahi, fulfilling an aspiration that sprung from Election Day on 8 November.

 

It began with the realisation that if I was to be an effective and accessible Member of Parliament for Te Tai Tonga, it was all about location, location, location.

 

Imagine then, the shock, to learn from my husband that when he arrived here last week, one of his initial impressions was to be harangued by a passerby, who identified him as Maori and decided that as such, Selwyn should be treated to a barrage of racist abuse.

 

It was not a good start.

 

But then again, maybe it was exactly the start I needed.

 

For if anything, that rude jolt of reality has strengthened my resolve that I must be the very best advocate I can be, to fight for our rights to be healthy, respected and free to achieve our wildest aspirations.

 

The irony of all ironies, was that on the day Selwyn experienced this dubious welcome, the 2008 Race Relations Report came out revealing that one in five respondents – 18 percent – reported they had been personally discriminated against in the past year, and the most common reason was race and ethnicity related.

 

The report goes further, describing the findings of the Racism and Health Project from the New Zealand Health Survey.

 

That project reported that racism is an important determinant to health – indeed when combined with socio-economic inequalities appeared to account for much of the health inequality between Maori and Pakeha.

 

This then, is a context for understanding our health and wellbeing.

But there are other contexts for life in Canterbury that shape and influence our Maori communities.

There is the vision of Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu that Ngai Tahu whanaui are culturally enriched; live long and live well; and lead the future.

There’s the sense of excitement that comes from a project called Whanau in Action: which will be expressed in the Hip Hop explosion that will take over Burnside High School early next month.

There’s the Walk the Talk challenge in which staff at He Oranga Pounamu have joined together, to live by a mission of healthy living and weight loss. This Walk the Talk project has a special feature, in that the real life trials and tribulations of addressing weight gain, and committing to an exercise programme are shared in a website blog to help create healthy habits and lifestyle change.

What is central in all of these projects is that connection to a sense of belonging, a sense of togetherness, a sense of collective responsibility and ownership – that the synergy of your energy with my energy, is what strengthens the essence of who we are – our whanau ora.

We have had that same sense today, in the projects featured in this Hui:

· The enthusiasm of Waipuna Youth and Community Services for the promising practices of teen parents;

· The partnership model anticipated by the Department of Building and Housing;

· The relationships to be nurtured between general practice and hospital services from Partnership Health PHO;

· The nutrition strategy created by the Canterbury Health Laboratory.

So how do all these projects fit together, to create a sustainable sense of hauora for all who call Otautahi home?

Are they just one-off wonders; projects that are great on the day, but do little to affect te ira tangata – the sense of physical being?

As they say, a koru on the plane doesn’t make it a Maori plane.

If we truly believe that good health is a taonga, a treasure, then we need to truly understand that our worldviews, beliefs and practices will impact on health status, and it is to our collective peril if we choose to ignore them.

 

The blog stories on weight gain are as important about creating that sense of collective manaakitanga, inspiring the spirit of kotahitanga, generating the respect for whanaungatanga, as they are about recording kilos lost, centimetres reduced.

 

This is the central challenge I believe facing many of our health providers today. It is about ensuring the time-honoured traditions we value - the hosting of our manuhiri; the guardianship of our whenua, is as relevant today as it was in the time of our tupuna.

 

Just as the Treaty of Waitangi belongs as much to Pakeha as it does to Maori, cultural competency is about respecting and recognising that together, all together, our shared experiences, past, present and future, create the unique identity of our nation.

 

And I think this is one of the most exciting realisations facing our nation – the realisation that what makes a person a New Zealander, is the fact that they live on this land called Aotearoa; that their interaction with our ancestral spirits, our traditions and customs as the indigenous peoples of this land, is what makes this place unique.

 

Tangata whenua are essentially what makes Pakeha in this land different from those whose spirits lie in lands across the sea. It is about connection, about belonging, about relationships.

 

And this brings me back to those findings on racism. If Maori and Pakeha are not living together in harmony – or at least accepting each other’s distinctive worldviews – then our capacity to enjoy good health is constrained.

 

As the Member of Parliament for Te Tai Tonga then, my interest is not just in measuring progress on the data on disparities, or in knowing about numbers of clinics held, workshops presented, hui hosted.

 

I am interested in the broadest determinants of health and wellbeing. I want to know the health of the stakeholder networks – how fluent is the communication between government workers and kaumatua? How visible are our Maori health workers in the broader range of hui?

 

I want to share three particular pieces of news in this important community consultation hui.

 

The first is our commitment in the Maori Party to some key policy ideas

 

To invest in a sustainable well-paid health workforce in public, non-government, and not for profit sector, including that the Maori health workforce shall get equal work for equal pay;

To ensure that the community receives accurate information about the performance of hospitals, PHOs and DHBs, including the reporting of adverse events at least every three months;

To support public health programmes to reduce the high incidence and cost of type two diabetes and heart disease;

To initiate wellness checks and warrant of fitness measures, including regular checks for diabetes, asthma, cardiac and chronic disease;

And to encourage agencies to live by a commitment to cultural competency, to ensure the quality of services, access and outcomes invest in wellbeing.

These are just some of the many ideaa and objectives we have identified in our policy programme, He aha te mea nui, in our belief in whanau ora – the promise of our people.

 

We have a full programme of health goals that we want to seek your feedback on – you can read all you ever want to know about it by going to www.maoriparty.org; or ask Elizabeth McKnight to send you everything you ever wanted to read and more!

 

The second set of priorities is the statement of intention so significant in our Relationship with the National Party, that I will quote the entire sentence:

 

The Maori Party seeks significant outcomes in whanau ora, through eliminating poverty, advocating for social justice, and advancing Maori social, cultural, economic and community development in the best interests of the nation.

 

And the third breaking news is the confidence that we all have in our co-leader Tariana Turia, in her ability to make a difference for Maori health outcomes, as the Associate Minister of Health.

 

We believe that we have been offered a way forward in the chance to be part of Government.

 

The responsibility for our future lies in our hands; in the way in which we take up every opportunity to support whanau ora.

 

But just as a hip-hop challenge is only as good as the crowd it gathers, so too, our capacity to effect change will come from all of us working together, for the collective advancement of us all.

 

It is about our physical, mental, social, psychological – and critically, cultural health. It is about our whanau, our elders, our tamariki, our rangatahi, our leaders, our movers and shakers, those in the kitchen, those on the pae, those who keep our urupa tidy; those who look after others; it is about us.

 

And again, to leave the last word to mana whenua:

M
te tuakana e tika ai te teina, m
te teina e tika ai te tuakana.

As the guiding values of Ngai Tahu say so clearly, it is through relationships and respect we can find the way forward.

Tena tatou katoa